


Count Piotr and the Vengeful Widow

by AJHall



Series: LoPiverse [2]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, LoPiverse - Fandom, Vorkosigan Saga - Lois McMaster Bujold
Genre: F/M, Lopiverse; Divergent Universe
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-22
Updated: 2011-04-22
Packaged: 2017-10-18 12:17:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,399
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/188815
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AJHall/pseuds/AJHall
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the darkest days of the Cetagandan occupation, the young General Count Piotr Vorkosigan receives help from an unexpected source...</p>
            </blockquote>





	Count Piotr and the Vengeful Widow

**Author's Note:**

> Set in the _Lust over Pendle_ universe, which, being written before _Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix_ diverges in significant points from HP at that point.
> 
> Mechanism of crossover between Vorkosiverse and HP inspired by E.H. Smith's _Marks and Scars_ to which I am indebted

To Count Piotr she was always _the_ woman.

I realise as I write this, resting my aching frame under a rug in the sun-warmed corner of my grand-daughter’s porch, the last living of our band of brothers (the General himself under the soil in the graveyard at Vorkosigan Surleau, and Amos Kyleuvi gone last year to join him – I lit the offering for him myself, taking the torch from the Countess’s own hand and the Emperor sent one of the Household in his Name to the burning – I wonder if he’ll do as much for old Esterhazy when my turn comes, eh?) that history has moved on, and all who read this will scoff, and call me liar.

No-one can now see past the fragile beauty, the perfect tragedy, the blazing firework that was the Princess-and-Countess Olivia, in memory of whom he broke and refashioned the Imperium.

Oh yes, she was an icon; she was at once a fragile flower and a haughty ice-princess; the summit of insuperable desire, the incontrovertible token of the Emperor’s favour and of the General’s own deserving.

The prize of war.

The spoil of war.

The broken victim – in the end – of war.

A princess of air and moonlight; forever haunting, forever beautiful, forever out of reach.

After my twice-twenty years were up, and after my honourable twilight service in the Count’s guard, I turned to poetry, you know. There were other Esterhazys at that time to follow the flag and acquit themselves with credit in the Service.

I turned to words as a man of a different complexion might turn to drink, or as Ezar – hard not to think of someone by his first name whom you’ve seen a bloody and beaten kid in the mud (but that’s another story, and one not to be told, not this side of the grave or the other) - turned to power and to an elusive hope he might enshrine the Imperium in his own image forever.

So you will say, but I sit here on my porch, thinking back to the days of war, living off bleeding horsemeat in the rain-lashed Dendarii mountains, aye, and lucky if we could set a fire to thaw it before cramming it into our starving mouths – well, yes, maybe as my granddaughter says I do ramble away, and get off the point, but still – if you reach 101 and still healthy (barring a touch of deafness) maybe it’s for you to wait and listen till I’ve finished, and if we go via a few unforeseen Districts, then where’s the harm, eh?

Oh, my pardons. I was talking of the Princess-and-Countess, and about how anyone could suppose that the General – who, after all, had once owned that fragile purity – might possibly be imagined to have a place in his heart for someone else.

Well, learn this. In a century’s experience as a man and a soldier (twice twenty years, yes, and the rest) I’ve never noticed that fragile purity is what gets the heart beating faster of a cold night.

And anyway: we (we of the old Dendarii, we of the true-and-trusted) learned fast enough once the Imperium had been broken and reformed over the wreck that had been Count Piotr’s bright and glorious hopes – his shining wife and her golden first-born – that it was not prudent to mention the Princess-and-Countess in his hearing.

Whereas - especially in his later years – the General would, from time to time on a cold night find his way into the guard-post at Vorkosigan House, or down at the Surleau, and we’d find ourselves swapping old soldiers’ tales, about the days back before the Princess-and-Countess had left her nursery, when it was all on the next minute, the ambush round the turn of the mountain trail, and none of us expected to see his 20th birthday.

And sometimes, on those nights of yarning, I’d see his mouth twist in a flicker of a grim smile, and a particular look in his eyes. And perhaps, if I or one of the other Armsmen who’d been in the mud-wrecked campaign back on that hopeless, endless autumn felt bold enough, we’d drop a hint or so.

_Remember when we were properly up to our arses in it, Sir, after we’d fallen back on the hills after Vorkosigan Vashnoi?_

And then, if we’d not been slapped back to our places and had him leave the guard post, slamming the door behind him,

_Remember her, Sir?_

The woman. The one who came from nowhere, and vanished into cobwebs and mist, but for all that was more real in her brief sojourn with us than those that many of us have spent our lives with.

 

____________________________________

It was Ensign Vormoncrieff who brought her in – or at least, that’s what went in the official log. In fact, it must have taken all his men’s efforts – and probably several negligently pointed plasma arcs - to put him up to it. As anyone who’d been out in his patrol knew well – and I can assure you, that duty was shuffled around on a rota even more strictly than sanitary trench clearing – when he encountered anything unexpected it took him so long to decide whether Imperial Regulations required him to shoot it, salute it or ignore it that if he ever had met a Cetagandan patrol they’d have rolled over him and been in Vorbarra Sultana by the time he’d finished trying to identify their clan markings and work out the order in which protocol required him to kill them. When he died a week or so later – by some freakish chance two of the grenades in his munitions pack turned out to have had the same manufacturing flaw in their firing pins – the General ordered some of his personal stock of wine broached in his honour, and told us to treasure his memory: we’d never see an officer his like again.

And we never did.

Anyway, Vormoncrieff’s patrol had somehow managed to capture – well.

They arrived back in camp, proudly bearing with them a young woman – who walked before them less like a prisoner than someone who had accepted a young man’s invitation to walk her home from a dance, and was studiously ignoring the fact that four of his closest friends had tagged along to find out how he got on. She was dressed in the deepest mourning, in a rather odd style: too tailored to be backcountry, but certainly nothing that had seen current fashion even in lost Vorkosigan Vashnoi, let alone the capital, for three decades or more.

General Piotr was sitting on a camp-stool in front of his tent. He looked up as the patrol approached.

“What the - ? Vormoncrieff!”

Vormoncrieff braced to attention so hard we heard his spine crack.

“Sir! We – ah – intercepted the intruder. Making her way towards the centre of the camp. Surrounded her. Disarmed her. Brought her in for interrogation. Sir!”

The new arrival surveyed him in a leisurely way.

“Hm,” she said. “You’ll be this General Piotr they were mentioning, I take it. Well: all I can say is: you’re a good bit younger and a lot nearer the action than the Generals I’m used to. And I have to admit; your not favouring a walrus makes a pleasant change, too. Anyway, if you’re the General, then it’s you I’m here to see.”

His voice rose in outrage.

"Madam! This is a fortified military installation of the Imperium! In time of war! It is certainly no place for a lady."

A slow, improbable and somehow deeply disturbing smile spread itself across the intruder's face.

"As I reckon your chaps have just been finding out, I'm no lady."

There was an assenting "oof" from Corporal Pym, who seemed to be having some difficulty walking straight, and who was sporting a decidedly non-regulation black eye.

The slightly battered and bruised state of the rest of the patrol – not excepting Ensign Vormoncrieff himself – suddenly became a great deal more noticeable. To all of us.

The General turned slowly towards the prisoner, a strange expression spreading across his face. She looked him straight in the eye. For an interminable moment the whole camp hung in suspense.

Count Piotr raised a sardonic eyebrow, and nodded. He turned to his batman, Vorinnis. “Tell the commissariat there will be two for supper in my tent this evening.” He turned back towards the prisoner. “Madam. I beg to inform you that you must be mistaken.”

She looked him up and down. “Eh?” she responded.

He gave a stiff, Academy nod.

“You dine with me this evening. And as my men should certainly have informed you, I am – when I can set aside my military rank - Count Vorkosigan. And the whole planet knows that the Vorkosigans never dine except with the very best quality. Milady! Will you walk with me?”

And he rose, extending his arm. As to the manner born she slid her black-clad arm into the crook of his. They turned to duck under the tent-flap.

“Aye. The pleasure will be mine, General. Yes; wherever this may be I reckon I have got to the right place, at that.”

Over his shoulder the General looked back at the whole gaping mob of us. He ignored every face except one.

“Vorinnis!” he snapped. “Cocktails! And look snappy!”

There was a hidden place up on the bluff just behind the General’s tent. The native scrub was thick, but somehow fortune had arranged that few of the more pestilential species had seeded up there. There was a flattened place where a select few of us were accustomed to gather to hear what was passing: those of us who’d grasped that there were old soldiers and bold soldiers, but no old bold soldiers, and that the key to growing older was knowing what the brass was thinking, or at least, prepared to blurt after a decent evening passing what passed as brandy in the correct direction, and in cut glass even if it was their own half-raw cavalry charger they were passing it over.

It was a long wait that evening. We saw shadows against the lamp-lit canvas; servitors passing back and forth, we presumed. And then the servitors were sent out, and the shadows stopped passing.

And we waited.

We were almost minded to sneak back to our own campfires when the stiff canvas of the flap was flung back with an abrupt gesture that in that still night sounded like gunfire, and two dark figures made their way out onto the cleared space lit by the flaring cressets in the darkness. The General’s comment was inaudible, muffled in the noise of the flapping canvas. Her answer, however, drifted clearly up to us.

“Well, I don’t know,” she said thoughtfully. “I got a bit worried about Martha Ollerenshaw – she’d had a bad time with her second, and she got her telegram two weeks ago, and she took it badly – quietly, if you know what I mean, and she didn’t cry – not that I saw, anyway. So I went up to her house to keep an eye on her, and there was no-one in, and her shawl gone from the peg on the back door. Well, the long and the short was, I asked around, and discovered she’d been last seen headed up Factory Brew, towards the Corporation reservoir, carrying her baby with her. Well. I followed on after fast as smoke. It looked bad. Also, if I was right about what she had in mind: well, from what I heard the baby hadn’t been given a vote in the matter. To say nothing of them as had paid Corporation rates to drink Corporation water.”

There was a pause. We could see the end of the General’s cigar glowing in the dark.

“Your public-spiritedness does you credit,” he observed dryly. A slight shadow showed where a black-bonnetted head inclined in acknowledgement.

“Well; when I got to the reservoir she was there all right; in the deep water and floundering about.” There was a pause. “No sign of her holding the baby. I took off as many clothes as I could in hurry, and waded right in towards Martha, diving just as I got there. The poor little scrap was still spiralling down towards the bottom of the reservoir; Martha must have only that minute let go. I got it back to land – made sure it was still breathing – and wrapped it in my shawl. Then I went back after Martha.”

There was another reflective pause. The cigar end glowed brighter.

“Go on,” the General said. We could see him pulling out a couple of camp stools, and the two of them sank down into them. Fortunately, it didn’t stop their voices being audible.

“Well! She was in a right state by then. And as luck would have it, she grabbed me by the throat, and I couldn’t get her off me – and her dress – she was still wearing it, of course - was swirling around and pulling us both down - she dragged me under - down, and down, till I thought I saw my Frank coming to meet me, in his best suit that he’d worn the day we were married. And I remember – when I saw him - being in two minds. But my lungs were hurting so, and the blood pounding in my ears, so I couldn’t think - and then suddenly we were both on the bank, next to where I’d left my clothes and the wrapped up baby, who had just remembered what his lungs were for, and was giving us all what for. I reckon they must have heard him in Carlisle. And then Martha looked up at me, and said, ‘What did you save me for?’”

There was another pause before the voice resumed. “And I didn’t reckon I had, not properly. I’d saved the baby, all right, but the dear alone knows what had got us two both to the bank. Because sure as fate; it hadn’t been me. But anyway, then her voice went husky on me, and I heard her say, ‘And you haven’t saved me, either. I’m going to die, come what may. This war’s going to kill all the Ollerenshaws. One way or the other. It’ll take him, before it’s done, too. In his uniform, on a desert road and with his tin hat on.’ ” And she pointed at the baby and – well. She’s a bit of a fool, Martha Ollerenshaw, and no-one who decides to take out how they happen to be feeling about life in general on their baby is likely to be top of my Christmas card list, but it wasn’t the first time I’d heard a Seer speak truth, and I knew what I was hearing then.”

There was a speaking silence, which resounded on the Barrayaran night. The musical deep voice resumed from down the bluff.

“And all of a sudden the great waste of the whole bloody mess seemed to sweep over me, and I heard myself muttering, ‘Just show me a war worth fighting, and a leader worth backing, and I’ll give him everything it takes to win.’ And then suddenly I found myself in yon bushes, just about to meet your patrol – eh, and a right bloody lot of noise they were making as they came along. Deaf, are they, your enemy in these parts?”

She did not pause for an answer, but swept steadily on.

“So; General. I reckon this is that war, and you’re my leader. And the only question is; what is it you need from me to win? Eh?”

We waited for a long time, peering down through the darkness. But the cigar must have gone out, and if Count Piotr spoke at all, it was in a voice too low for us to overhear.

_______________________________________

She was gone by the morning. I don’t think any of us actually would have had the hardihood to ask where she had spent the night (those were, you recall, the days when the lead-lined hoses were still ImpSec standard issue), but the question was, in any event, answered for us: as those on that rota went towards claiming our breakfast from the commissariat Vorinnis was conspicuously visible down-slope, standing over a detail who were dismantling a small but bizarrely well-appointed pavilion, bearing a discreetly sewn on label – ‘Siegling’s Superior Portable Field Bivouac’ - which had not been erected when we had turned in the previous evening.

Count Piotr, then as always, knew exactly how soldiers think.

We didn’t see her again for a week or so. When we did, she was not alone. The sight of her companion on that occasion caused the impeccably correct Vorbacheov (who was, not so many years later, to die in an uprising on his country estate, when his serfs took some mild relaxations he had introduced to the harsh reign of his forebears a great deal further than he had intended) to have a nosebleed in sheer outrage. After he had mopped himself up, he headed determinedly towards the two women, a light of righteous indignation in his eye.

He hadn’t, however, done more than splutter a few platitudes, and gone a dangerous shade of purple before the General came out of his tent. He looked at the two women as though they’d been respectively Prince Tav and a jump-ship cargo of smuggled weaponry, and beckoned them into his tent instantly. And we knew nothing of their discussions for an hour or so.

And then we knew – oh yes, then we knew – what it had all been about.

As I and three others from my company, brusquely summoned to attend on the General’s tent, entered under the shade of the canvas we heard a high, outraged voice (Vorbacheov – stout fighting man as he was when pressed - could always be relied on for an amusing outbreak of righteous indignation).

The stranger, clad in her customary widow's weeds, was standing by a figure whose travelling cloak was flung back from her flame-like sweep of unbound hair like a banner of defiance. As one man, we gulped. Audibly. We had not dreamed we would ever see her so near. Or – so inexpensively.

And we had certainly no idea of how she had found her way through the serried ranks of the enemy to our camp in the barren wilderness.

The woman who was known throughout Vorbarra Sultana and all outlying Districts as the Countess Vorkurtizanka turned, and smiled at us.

Four picked men of the Dendarii Irregular Light Cavalry shook where they stood, and their knees turned to jelly beneath them.

Needless to say, Vorkurtizanka was hardly her real name. That had been lost years before, and she, at least, showed no signs of mourning for it.

They said she had been born in some dirt-poor hamlet up in these very hills. That she had escaped at an early age, and made her way (surviving who knows how?) down to the valley, and thence to Vorkosigan Vashnoi, then in its brilliant final flowering of passion and style.

And then some Vor lordling – or another – or perhaps another – had seen her, been smitten, hoped to hold that blazing comet in his arms forever – and, obedient to her lightest whim, taken her to the capital.

Where, it was rumoured, she had ditched her protector in short order; had had the Crown Prince himself prostrate in Vorhartung Square pleading to kiss her booted ankle, and had half the Council of Counts pleading with her steward for invitations to those so-well-publicised intimate little dinners.

And then the war had come.

Judging by the glossy floor-length cloak of galactic neo-mink the Countess Vorkurtizanka wore, the war had not – as yet, at least – come too close to home for her.

Vorbacheov turned eloquently towards the sardonic widow, who stood by her companion with a smile of utter satisfaction on her lips.

“Madam!” he expostulated. “Only think! Do you have any concept of what sort of woman this is?”

The Countess turned to face him, her eyes full of an arctic chill that out-froze the Black Escarpment in the worst of the winter storms. She need not, however, have troubled herself.

Our friend put her head on one side. Briefly. After a second or so she said, in measured tones,

“A remarkably successful one, it looks like to me.”

Slightly too late, the Countess buried her smile beneath the high neck of her fur wrap. Vorbacheov’s face went puce: a vein throbbed in his head.

“Madam! She’s a notorious society harlot! She’s been the talk of the capital for the last five years!”

The slow deep voice was measured, pondering, in answer.

“Aye, I daresay. And doubtless she gave good value for the gossip. And for everything else, I don’t doubt.” There was a pause. “Five years, eh? I reckon that means she’ll have got a lot closer to the Cetagandan High Command than you’ll have managed, over the same period?”

Vorbacheov gaped like a gaffed salmon. And no-one else had any answer to that, either.

Truth is remarkably bad-mannered, I’ve noticed. And obtrusive.

The General roused himself from the head of the table, and quelled the still-spluttering Vorbacheov with a glance. He gave us a chilly over-view, as though registering our unspoken sins against military discipline through his pores. He looked down at the Countess, and gave her a bow every line of which betrayed how it had been refined in the Imperial Residence, and, doubtless, in the Presence itself.

“Madam. We are more grateful than we can say for the assurance of your goodwill in this enterprise. Believe it: the Emperor will know that you stood with us in Barrayar’s darkest hour. Men! Escort the lady to her horse, and see her safe to the village below. And death to anyone who offers her the smallest insult!”

We did as he said, of course.

About a month later we heard of the suicide of the Cetagandan third-in-command, a hard liner whose scorched earth measures in the Districts under his command had become notorious in the shortest possible time. He left a rambling, incoherent farewell note, full of apocalyptic references to fire and ice, and to the female serpent who lies coiled, gnawing into the heart of the world, and whose eyes lead to destruction any man who looks fully into them.

They say that among the many outstanding debts found at his death the one to a Jacksonian couturier for a floor-length cloak of the finest vat-cultivated neo-mink was the biggest, and the longest outstanding.

The black-clad woman was back in camp three days later with two other ladies, of equally negotiable virtue but infinitely less sophistication.

They intimated that, for a substantial consideration (professional reputation – no matter what the profession – costs a great deal on the open market) expressed in hard currency rather than the IOUs with which the General and the Emperor behind him were paying for everything else that winter, including our wages, the two would undertake to organize the distribution of a certain very well targeted infection promiscuously throughout the enemy ranks.

“And that, if you’ll pardon the expression, ought to take their eyes properly off the ball,” our widow commented, in order to reinforce the point to a thunderstruck General Staff.

We saw the General look at our black-clad guardian angel, and give a slow grin. It looked like the expression on the face of a long-bleached skull.

There was, we were told, no risk at all to the Barrayarans. The General informed us that galactic medicine had moved on considerably during the Time of Isolation. This sort of biological warfare was childsplay to personalize to a particular genetic – or planetary – grouping. And, in any event, if anyone remained really worried, it seemed there was a prophylactic injection.

Paid for in advance, of course. In hard currency.

R&R visits to the local hostelries fell off decidedly for the next month or so. Notwithstanding.

Six weeks later we defeated an overwhelmingly superior Cetagandan force at the Battle of the Dumoins Ridge. For some reason, their heart didn’t seem to be in it, and their concentration was very definitely elsewhere. And their troops seemed more inclined to throw themselves onto our bayonets than to sue for mercy.

After that, we would wait for her to appear. See who came with her. And take discreet bets on how the fortunes of war would change thereafter.

Over the cold hard fought months that followed anger was always with us; hunger and fear its constant companions.

But hope remained. When it threatened to waver, someone else would, impossibly, appear in the train of the General’s Widow (for so we came to call her) and after that the enemy would be sure to receive a set-back from some unperceived quarter or other.

She was our luck, our talisman, our improbable figurehead. She pulled the women of Barrayar into the fight, when neither they themselves, nor their men, nor the Cetagandans (especially, not the Cetagandans) realized that she had shaped an army, and shaped it under everyone’s noses, too.

She was everywhere, and miraculously unperceived as she went the length and breadth of the planet. Her allies were legion and from all walks of life; and she never, it seemed, made a mistake in choosing them.

Once (a brief glimpse, a touch of cold steel against my gizzard, and a slow, spine-chilling enunciation of what would happen should I ever blab the barest hint, whether in the lifetime of the lady or of her sons and daughters to come after her) it was a real Countess who came, swathed in black wool, and stealing into the campsite at the dead hour before dawn, her face set and her lips murmuring imprecations and promises as to what she would not stop at to drive the invader from our holy soil.

I only hope the Count Vorbretten had agreed in advance to take the risk of cuckoos in his aristocratic nest.

But whether he did or not, certainly his was the District from which the first faint thaw began, with the barest possible hint of a desire for peace breathed towards the General’s ever open ears. After that, there was a sudden flurry of cracks in the previously solid ice of the Cetagandan front. And then another flurry. And another. And then the floods of meltwater bore down over the occupying army, and the General and the Emperor, who had been preparing themselves, it seemed, all long winter against this turn of fortune, swept through to victory and washed the last traces of the invaders from the face of the planet, and Barrayar flowered into the full glory of her Imperial spring.

It was back at the camp where she had first appeared that they parted. It was smaller than it had been, and the last tents would be struck on the morrow, leaving the faint lines of horse pickets and sanitary trenches to blur, season on season, back into the scrub, so that eventually no-one would be able to tell we had ever been there.

We were up on the bluff as before, and as the two of them emerged from the General’s tent it became apparent that the widow had just been asked a question, for she was shaking her head vigorously.

“No,” we heard her say distinctly. The General began a swift, expostulatory gesture, but she cut him short.

“General, I think you’re about to find that winning the war is the easy part. Now – you have landless men, rootless men turned loose across the plant. Wandering about. Men who have seen their homes turning into rubble and glowing coal. Men who’ve been able to do nothing as their wives and children were torn from them. Men who’ve seen for themselves how quickly you can better yourself with the help of a knife and no scruples about using it. Women, too. Women who’ve woken up, who know exactly how much of this victory was down to them, and who’ve outgrown their corsets, as the saying goes. No-one’s going to bundle them back where they came from; not without a struggle, in any event. And I don’t envy the man who tries. These last few months, I’ve seen what your Barrayaran women are capable of, and believe me; if you breed up women to think it’s their duty to slit their own babies' throats in proper circumstances, there isn’t another throat they’ll baulk at, given sufficient incentive. You might tell your Emperor to think on that.”

She paused for breath. “So; you’ve got a planet to govern, the two of you. And who knows how many civil wars to nip in the bud? And your front door to secure, one of these years, so you can bolt it shut next time someone you don’t care over-much for comes knocking. And don’t try telling me that there’s the other Counts to help you, because one way and the other I’ve seen most of them this war; aye, and seen ‘em from the underside, too. There’s more than one District residence I’ve got into by charring when nothing else would serve, to find out what kind of man ruled it. And I can tell you; a quarter of them or more were yellow traitors, selling out their own people to keep their castles from the invaders. There’ll be plenty of old scores to be settled with them. Half of the rest are children, owing to the Cetagandans having chopped off anyone who had a bit of spirit. When you account for the ones who are senile, and the ones who were right bloody raving lunatics before this all started, by all accounts, and whose sanity hasn’t been improved by recent months.”

She took another deep breath. Even from this distance, we could see how white she was looking; the contrast was striking against the black of her high-necked gown.

“You’ll be needing one of your own sort besides you to deal with that. Someone born to the soil of this planet. Someone your people know is one of them, by birth – aye, and blood. Snobbish lot they are round here, I’ve noticed. All very well when they need you to do their dirty work: they’ll speak all nice and polite then. But when everything’s back all nice and normal, they won’t give the time of day to someone without a Vor in front of her name, and a pedigree going the whole way back to some mad Emperor’s horse.”

She gestured towards the distant horizon.

“Anyway, it’s a war I swore I’d win with you. And we bloody did, didn’t we? As for the rest; you’re on your own.”

Her voice softened slightly.

“You’ll thank me for it in years to come. You don’t want a woman who mopes around because she reckons it comes damn unnatural when the plants come up in spring, and they’re already autumn tints. And anyway, I’ve been thinking. I didn’t have a lot of space for thinking, back home. Round Accrington, in our neighbourhood at least, it was more about survival than introspection.”

She turned to face him. Her face was lit in a grim smile. “Anyway, I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s another battle I need to win. And I need to be somewhere else to do it. So no, Piotr, thank you all the same. I’m not saying I’m not greatly obliged – aye, and flattered. It’s not every day you get to turn down a chance to be a Countess. No, Piotr. Be happy. Marry one of your own sort. And don’t bloody well waste my efforts with this planet, or I will come back and haunt you!”

“Is that a promise?” Count Piotr enquired. A grin spread across the widow’s face.

“Not one you’ll be wanting me to fulfil, I assure you.”

His lips, too, were forced into a smile.

“Just try me.”

But the slightly-too contrived military erectness of his shoulders told its own story. Carefully, formally, he raised her black-lace mittened hand to his lips, and kissed it. And watched as the small, dauntless figure made its way down the slope, walking steadily towards the glittering silver ribbon of the Long Lake, in the valley far below. She did not look back.

We never saw her again.

But to Count Piotr, she was always _the_ woman.


End file.
